The ray-traced renderer is not something to worry about. (You can tick the box so that the error message doesn't show up anymore.)

The After Effects team is not putting any more development into the ray-traced renderer. They are, however, putting a lot of development into a more powerful way to do 3d in AE: Cinema 4D comes free with After Effects!

While I have you guys here, any tutorial you can point me to that makes it easy to create a 3D object?

The link I pointed you to in my post has good resources in it. Granted, it's not a tutorial to do exactly what you want to do, but it's pretty basic and, if you don't get the basics down, you're going to be wasting your time anyway.